Kubernetes Python client returns pod's JSON HTTP response from proxy verb as string with single quotes instead of double quotes

I'm requesting some JSON data from a pod's web server via the Kubernetes API proxy verb. That is:

corev1 = kubernetes.client.CoreV1Api()
res = corev1.connect_get_namespaced_pod_proxy_with_path(
    'mypod:5000', 'default', path='somepath', path2='somepath')
print(type(res))
print(res)

The call succeeds and returns a str containing the serialized JSON data from my pod's web service. Unfortunately, res now looks like this ... which isn't valid JSON at all, so json.loads(res) denies to parse it:

{'x': [{'xx': 'xxx', ...

As you can see, the stringified response looks like a Python dictionary, instead of valid JSON. Any suggestions as to how this convert safely back into either correct JSON or a correct Python dict?

Looking at the source code for core_v1_api.py. The method calls generally accept a kwarg named _preload_content.

Setting this argument to False instructs the method to return the urllib3.HTTPResponse object instead of a processed str. You can then work directly with the data, which cooperates with json.loads().

Example:

corev1 = client.CoreV1Api()
res = corev1.connect_get_namespaced_pod_proxy_with_path(
    'mypod:5000', 'default', path='somepath', 
    path2='somepath', _preload_content=False)
json.loads(res.data)